Tuesday, October 19, 2010

TAM London speaker 3: Cory Doctorow

Cory is an interesting chap. I’ve read some of his books, which are smart and driven by geek culture. He’s also a major proponent of privacy and copyright reform and an opponent of stupid digital rights management. He’s released all his novels under a creative commons license, which means people can download and modify them providing they don’t do so for commercial reasons. He’s also the editor of boingboing, which no self-respecting geek (if there is such a thing) can do without.

His talk was smart and a joy to hear. I do some work in privacy too, from a computer science sort of perspective. I’m more concerned with how privacy can be preserved when we put services together as part of e-government. Well, to be more clear, I’m trying to work out how to write middleware to do that. And how to work out where and why that middleware will fail. And how we software engineers can learn to build this kind of software…

Cory’s ideas about copyright and DRM and so on are the ones I’ve been haranguing everyone I know with for the last decade or so. However, where I complain, Cory writes (quite good) novels and edits important websites and makes an important nuisance of himself.